Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “I don’t believe we shall,” said Elfrida, nodding stubbornly, and for the first time in this story she did not believe.

  “Oh, well,” said the Mouldiwarp bitterly, “of course if you don’t believe you’ll find him, you’ll not find him. That’s plain as a currant loaf.”

  “But I believe we shall find him,” said Edred, “and Elfrida’s only a girl. It might be only a dream, of course,” he added thoughtfully. “Don’t you think I don’t know that. But if it’s a dream, I’m going to stay in it. I’m not going back to Arden without my father.”

  “Do you understand,” said the Mouldiwarp, “that if I take you into any other time or place in your own century, it’s the full stop? There isn’t any more.”

  “It means there’s no chance of our getting into the past again, to look for treasure or anything?”

  “Oh, chance!” said the Mouldiwarp. “I mean no magic clock’ll not never be made for you no more, that’s what I mean. And if you find your father you’ll not be Lord Arden any more, either!”

  I hope it will not shock you very much when I tell you at that thought a distinct pang shot through Edred’s breast. He really felt it, in his flesh-and-blood breast, like a sharp knife. It was dreadful of him to think of such a thing, when there was a chance of his getting his daddy in exchange for just a title. It was dreadful; but I am a truthful writer, and I must own the truth. In one moment he felt the most dreadful things–that it was all nonsense, and perhaps daddy wasn’t there, and it was no good looking for him any way, and he wanted to go on being Lord Arden, and hadn’t they better go home.

  The thoughts came quite without his meaning them to, and Edred pushed them from him with both hands, so to speak, hating himself because they had come to him. And he will hate himself for those thoughts, though he did not mean or wish to have them, as long as he lives, every time he remembers them. That is the worst of thoughts, they live for ever.

  “I don’t want to be Lord Arden,” was what he instantly said–”I want my father.” And what he said was true, in spite of those thoughts that he didn’t mean to have and can never forget.

  “Shall I come along of you?” said the Mouldiwarp, and every one said “Yes,” very earnestly. A friendly Mouldiwarp is a very useful thing to have at hand when you are going you don’t know where.

  “Now, you won’t make any mistake,” the mole went on. “This is the wind-up and the end-all. So it is. No more chestses in atticses. No more fine clotheses out of ’em neither. An’ no more white clocks.”

  “All right,” said Edred impatiently, “we understand. Now let’s go.”

  “You wait a bit,” said the Mouldiwarp aggravatingly. “You’ve got to settle what you’ll be, and what way your father’d better come out. I think through the chink of the chalk.”

  “Any way you like,” said Elfrida. “And Mouldiwarp, dear, shan’t we ever see you again?”

  “Oh, I don’t say that,” it said. “You’ll see me at dinner every day.”

  “At dinner?”

  “I’m on all the spoons and forks, anyhow,” it said, and sniggered more aggravatingly than ever.

  “Mouldie!” cried Edred suddenly, “I’ve got it. You disguise us so that father won’t know us, and then we shan’t be out of it all, whatever it is.”

  “I think that’s a first-rate idea,” said Richard; “and me too.”

  “Not you,” said the Mouldiwarp. But it waved a white paw at Edred and Elfrida, and at once they found themselves dressed in tight-fitting white fur dresses. Their hands even wore fat, white fur gloves with tiger claws at the ends of the fingers. At the same moment the Mouldiwarp grew big again–to the size of a very small Polar bear, while Cousin Richard suddenly assumed the proportions of a giant.

  “Now!” said the Mouldiwarp, and they all leapt on the white clock, which started at once.

  When it stopped, and they stepped off it, it was on to a carpet of thick moss. Overhead, through the branches of enormous trees, there shone stars of a wonderful golden brightness. The air was warm-scented as if with flowers, and warm to breathe, yet they did not feel that their fur coats were a bit too warm for the weather. The moss was so soft to their feet that Edred and Elfrida wanted to feel it with their hands as well, so down they went on all fours. Then they longed to lie down and roll on it; they longed so much that they had to do it. It was a delicious sensation, rolling in the soft moss.

  Cousin Richard, still very much too big, stood looking down on them and laughing. They were too busy rolling to look at each other.

  “This,” he said, “is a first-class lark. Now for the cleft in the chalk. Shall I carry you?” he added politely, addressing the Mouldiwarp, who, rather surprisingly, consented.

  “Come on,” he said to the children, and as he went they followed him.

  There was something about the moss, or about the fur coats or the fur gloves, that somehow made it seem easier and more natural to follow on all fours–and really their hands were quite as useful to walk on as their feet. Never had they felt so light, so gay, never had walking been such easy work. They followed Richard through the forest till quite abruptly, like the wall at the end of a shrubbery, a great cliff rose in front of them, ending the forest. There was a cleft in it, they saw the darkness of it rising above them as the moon came out from a cloud and shone full on the cliff’s white face and the face of the cliff and the shape of the cleft were very like that little cleft in the chalk that the Mouldiwarp had made when it had pulled up turf on the Sussex downs at home. And all this time Edred and Elfrida had never looked at each other. There had been so many other things to look at.

  “That’s the way,” said Cousin Richard, pointing up the dark cleft. Though it was so dark Edred and Elfrida could see quite plainly that there were no steps–only ledges that a very polite goat might have said were a foothold.

  “You couldn’t climb up there,” Edred said to the great Richard; yet somehow he never doubted that he and Elfrida could.

  “No,” said the Mouldiwarp, leaping from Richard’s arms to the ground, “I must carry him”–and it grew to Polar bear size quite calmly before their very eyes.

  “They don’t see it–even yet,” said Richard to the mole.

  “See what?” Elfrida asked.

  “Why, what your disguise is. You’re cats, my dear cousins, white cats!”

  Then Edred and Elfrida did look at each other, and it was quite true, they were.

  “I’ll tell you what my plan is,” Richard went on. “The people of this country have never seen tame cats. They think a person who can tame animals is a magician. I found that out when I was here before. So now I’ve got three tame animals, all white too, that is, if you’ll play,” he added to the Mouldiwarp. “You will play, won’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, I’ll play!” it said, snarling a little.

  “And you cats must only mew and purr, and do whatever I tell you. You’ll see how I work it. Don’t do anything for any one but me and your father.”

  “Is father really here?” asked Elfrida, trembling a little.

  “He’s on the other side of the great cliff,” said Richard,–”the cliff no man can climb. But you can come.”

  He got on the Mouldiwarp’s back and put his arms round its Polar-bear-like neck, and it began to climb. That was a climb. Even the cats, which Edred and Elfrida now could not help seeing that they were, found it as much as they could do to keep their footing on those little, smooth, shelving ledges. If it had not been that they had cats’ eyes, and so could see in the dark, they never could have done it. And it was such a long, long climb too; it seemed as though it would last for ever.

  “I’ve heard of foreign climbs,” said Elfrida, “but I never thought they would be like this. I suppose it is foreign?”

  “South American,” said Richard. “You can look for it on the map when you get home–but you won’t find it. Come on!”

  And then when they had climbed to the top of the cliff they had to go down on th
e other side. For the cliff rose like a wall between the forest and a wide plain, and by the time they reached that plain the sun was looking down at them over the cliff.

  The plain was very large and very wonderful, and a towering wall of cliff ran all round it. The plain was all laid out in roads and avenues and fields and parks. Towns and palaces were dotted about it–a tall aqueduct on hundreds of pillars brought water from an arch in the face of the cliff to the middle of the plain, and from these canals ran out to the cliff wall that bounded the plain all round, even and straight, like the spokes of a wheel, and disappeared under low arches of stone, back under the cliff. There were lakes, there were gardens, there were great stone buildings whose roofs shone like gold where the rising sun struck them.

  In the fields were long-horned cattle and strange, high-shouldered sheep, which Richard said were llamas.

  “I know,” he explained, “from seeing them on the postage stamps.”

  They advanced into the plain and sat down under a spreading tree.

  “We must just wait till we’re found,” said Richard. He had assumed entire command of the expedition, and Edred and Elfrida, being cats, had to submit, but they did not like it.

  Presently shepherds coming early to attend to their flocks found a boy in strange clothes, attended by a great white bear and two white cats, sitting under a tree.

  The shepherds did not seem afraid of the bear–only curious and interested; but when the Mouldiwarp had stood up on its hind legs and bowed gravely and the cats had stood up and lain down and shaken paws and turned somersaults at the word of command one of the shepherds wrapped his red woollen cloak round him with an air of determination and, making signs that Richard was to follow, set off with all his might for the nearest town.

  Quite soon they found themselves in the central square of one of the most beautiful towns in the world. I wish I had time to tell you exactly what it was like, but I have not. I can only say that it was at once clean and grand, splendid and comfortable. There was not a dirty corner nor a sad face from one end of the town to the other. The houses were made of great blocks of stone inlaid wonderfully with gold and silver; clear streams–or baby canals–ran by the side of every street, and each street had a double row of trees running all along its wide length. There were open, grassy spaces and flower-beds set with flowers, some glowing with their natural and lovely colours and some cunningly fashioned of gold and silver and jewels. There were fountains and miniature waterfalls. The faces of the people were dark, but kind and unwrinkled. There was a market with stalls of pleasant fruits and cakes and bright-coloured, soft clothes. There was a great Hall in the middle of the town with a garden on its flat roof, and to this Hall the shepherd led the party.

  “THE HOUSES WERE MADE OF GREAT BLOCKS OF STONE.”

  The big doors of inlaid wood were set wide and a crowd, all dressed in soft stuffs of beautiful colours, filled the long room inside. The room was open to the sky; a wrinkled awning drawn close at one side showed that the people could have a roof when it suited them.

  There was a raised stone platform at one end, and on this three chairs. The crowd made way for the shepherd and his following, and as they drew near to the raised platform the two white cats, who were Edred and Elfrida, looked up and saw in the middle and biggest chair a splendid, dark-faced man in a kind of fringed turban with two long feathers in it, and in the two chairs to right and left of him, clothed in beautiful embroidered stuffs, with shining collars of jewels about their necks, Father and Uncle Jim!

  “Not a word!” said Cousin Dick, just in time to restrain the voices of the children who were cats. Their actions he could not restrain. Every one in that hall saw two white cats spring forward and rub themselves against the legs of the man who sat in the right-hand chair. Compelled to silence as they were by the danger of their position, Edred and Elfrida rubbed their white-cat bodies against their father’s legs in a rapture which I cannot describe and purred enthusiastically. It was a wonderful relief to be able to purr, since they must not speak.

  The King–he who sat on the high seat–stood up, looking down on them with wise, kind eyes, and spoke, seeming to ask a question.

  Quite as wonderfully as any trained bear, and far more gracefully, the white Mouldiwarp danced before the King of that mysterious hidden kingdom.

  Then Dick whistled, and Edred and Elfrida withdrew themselves from their passionate caresses of the only parts of their father that they could get at, and stood upon their white-hind-cat-feet.

  “The minuet,” said Edred, in a rapid whisper. Dick whistled a tune that they had never heard, but the tune was right; and now was seen the spectacle of two white cats slowly and solemnly going through the figures of that complicated dance to the music of Dick’s clear whistling, turning, bowing, pacing with all the graces that Aunt Edith had taught them when they were Edred and Elfrida and not white cats.

  When the last bow and curtsey ended the dance, the King himself shouted some word that they were sure meant, “Well done!” All the people shouted the same word, and only Father and Uncle Jim shouted “Bravo!”

  Then the King questioned Dick.

  No answer. He laid his finger on his lips.

  Then the King spoke to Father, and he in turn tried questions, in English and French and then in other languages. And still Dick kept on laying his finger on his lips, and the white bear shook its head quite sadly, and the white cats purred aloud with their eyes on their father.

  Richard stopped. “When your father goes out, follow him,” he whispered.

  And so, when the King rose from his throne and went out, and every one else did the same, the white cats, deserting Dick, followed close on their father’s footsteps. When the King saw this, he spoke to the men about him, who were leading Richard in another direction, and presently the cats and the bear that was the Mouldiwarp, and Richard found themselves alone with Uncle Jim and the father of Elfrida on a beautiful terrace shaded by trees, and set all along its edge with wonderful trailing flowers of red and white and purple that grew out of vases of solid silver.

  And now, there being none of the brown people near, Richard looked full in the eyes of the father of Edred and Elfrida, and said in a very low voice–

  “I am English. I’ve come to rescue you.”

  “You’re a bold boy,” said Edred and Elfrida’s father, “but rescue’s impossible.”

  “There’s not much time,” said Richard again; “they’ve only let us come here just to see if you know us. I expect they’re listening. You are Lord Arden now–the old lord is dead. I can get you out if you do exactly as I say.”

  “It’s worth trying,” said Uncle Jim,–”it’s worth trying anyhow, whatever it is.”

  “Are you free to go where you like?”

  “Yes,” said Lord Arden–not Edred, but Edred’s father, for Edred was now no longer Lord Arden. “You see there’s no way out but the one, and that’s guarded by a hundred men with poisoned arrows.”

  “There is another way,” said Richard; “the way we came. The white bear can carry you, one at a time.”

  “Shall we risk it?” said Lord Arden, a little doubtfully.

  “Rather!” said Uncle Jim; “think of Edith and the kids.”

  “That’s what I am thinking of,” said Lord Arden; “while we’re alive there’s a chance. If we try this and fail, they’ll kill us.”

  “You won’t fail,” said Richard. “I’ll help you to get home; but I would like to know how you got into this fix. It’s only curiosity. But I wish you’d tell me. Perhaps I shan’t see you again after to-day.”

  “We stumbled on the entrance, the only entrance to the golden plain,” said Lord Arden, “prospecting for gold among these mountains. They have kept us prisoners ever since, because they are determined not to let the world know of the existence of the plain. There are always rumours of it, but so far no ‘civilised’ people have found it. Every King when he comes to the throne takes an oath that he will die sooner than
allow the plain to be infected by the wicked cruelties of modern civilisation.”

  “I think so too,” said Dick.

  “This is an older civilisation than that of the Incas,” said Lord Arden, “and it is the most beautiful life I have ever dreamed of. If they had trusted me, I would never have betrayed them. If I escape, I will never betray them. If I let in our horrible system of trusts and syndicates, and commercialism and crime, on this golden life, I should know myself to be as great a criminal as though I had thrown a little child to wild beasts.”

  The white cats noticed with wonder and respect that their father addressed Richard exactly as though he had been a grown-up.

  “We managed to send one line to a newspaper, to say that we were taken by bandits,” Lord Arden went on; “it was all that they would allow us to do. But except that we have not been free, we have had everything–food, clothes, kindness, justice, affection. We must escape, if we can, because of my sister and the children, but it is like going out of Eden into the Black Country.”

  “That’s so,” said Uncle Jim.

  “And if we’re not to see you again,” Lord Arden went on, “tell me why you have come–at great risk it must be–to help us.”

  “I owe a debt,” said Richard, in a low voice, “to all who bear the name of Arden.” His voice sank so low that the two cats could only hear the words “head of the house.”

  “And now,” Richard went on, “you see that black chink over there?” he pointed to the crevice in the cliff. “Be there, both of you, at moonrise, and you shall get away safely to Arden Castle.”

  “You must come with us, of course,” said Lord Arden. “I might be of service to you. We have quite a respectable little fortune in a bank at Lima–not in our own names–but we can get it out, if you can get us out. You’ve brought us luck, I’m certain of it. Won’t you go with us, and share it?”

  “I can’t,” said Richard. “I must go back to my own time, my own place, I mean. Now I’ll go. Come on, cats.”